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On What Kind of Applications Can Clustering Be Used for Inferring MVC Architectural Layers?

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Advances in Information Systems Development (ISD 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation ((LNISO,volume 63))

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Abstract

Mobile applications are one of the most used pieces of software nowadays, as they continue to expand, the architecture of those software systems becomes more important. In the fast-paced domain of the mobile world, the applications need to be developed rapidly and they need to work on a wide range of devices. Moreover, those applications need to be maintained for long periods and they need to be flexible enough to work and interact with new hardware. Model View Controller (MVC) is one of the most widely used architectural patterns for building those kinds of applications. In this paper, we are analysing how an ML technique, in fact clustering, can be used for detecting autonomously the conformance of various mobile codebases to the MVC pattern. With our method CARL, we pave the way for creating a tool that automatically validates a mobile codebase from an architectural point of view. We have analyzed CARL’s performance on 8 iOS codebases distributed into 3 different classes based on their size (small, medium, large) and it has an accuracy of 81%, an average Mean Silhouette coefficient of 0.81, and an average Precision computed for each layer of 83%.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Metrics like accuracy, precision, and recall will be used for this purpose.

  2. 2.

    The performance can be evaluated through metrics like homogeneity, completeness, Silhouette Coefficient score, Davies-Bouldin index.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, Babes-Bolyai University, Mihail Kogǎlniceanu 1, Cluj-Napoca, 400347, Cluj, Romania

    Dragoş Dobrean & Laura Dioşan

Authors
  1. Dragoş Dobrean
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  2. Laura Dioşan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dragoş Dobrean .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Business Informatics Research Center, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    Gheorghe Cosmin Silaghi

  2. Business Informatics Research Center, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj Napoca, Romania

    Robert Andrei Buchmann

  3. Department of Computer Science, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    Virginia Niculescu

  4. Department of Computer Science, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    Gabriela Czibula

  5. Business Information Systems Discipline, University of Galway, Galway, Ireland

    Chris Barry

  6. Business Information Systems Discipline, University of Galway, Galway, Ireland

    Michael Lang

  7. Department of Human-Centred Computing, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

    Henry Linger

  8. IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Barcelona, Spain

    Christoph Schneider

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Dobrean, D., Dioşan, L. (2023). On What Kind of Applications Can Clustering Be Used for Inferring MVC Architectural Layers?. In: Silaghi, G.C., et al. Advances in Information Systems Development. ISD 2022. Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation, vol 63. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32418-5_7

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